Where new money comes from
A cartoon printed in Percy Greave’s Understanding the Dollar Crisis : 
Patent Failure -- new book by Bessen & Muerer
From How Judges, Bureaucrats and Lawyers Put Innovators at RiskIn “Patent Failure; How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk,” (Princeton University Press, March 2008), James Bessen and Michael J.
Welcome to the new Ice Age
According to the National Post today:
Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966. The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January “was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average.” China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century.
My note to the author of Last Knight
Here is a note that I wrote Guido Hulsmann, author of Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism:
Fascism, Left and Right
Goldberg has in the past treated libertarians with disdain, but here he offers an analysis of fascism that libertarians will find familiar. Goldberg has been influenced by John T. Flynn’s comparison of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal with Italian fascism; and he cites Friedrich Hayek with respect. He has learned from Murray Rothbard on the progressives as well.A Bull Market for CPAs
Thanks in part to Sarbanes-Oxley and the public education system, the US is facing a shortage of bean counters. Much has been said on this topic in recent times, and indeed, it is true. There are several explanations for this.
What Do You Mean by ‘Change’?
I used to think that Reagan was fiscally irresponsible as president, compared to his predecessor. But then I thought the same thing about Bush I, then Clinton, and now Bush II. But surely, after the record-setting budget deficits and the massive increases in government spending, debt, and inflation of the last seven years, whoever is elected next must stop this trend, which can’t continue forever. Right?
Troll Tracker’s Identity Revealed :(
I posted previously about patent attorney Ray Niro threatening to sue the anonymous Troll Tracker (who repeatedly highlighted various patent lawsuits Niro was filing) for violating a patent by putting JPG images on his site (yep), and creepily offering a bounty to reveal Troll Tracker’s identity (Troll Tracker [Why People Hate Lawyers]). Looks like Niro’s ploy finally worked--it’s an in-house patent attorney at Cisco, Rick Frenkel.
Freedom via socialist ethics
Reading about the Harvard vote to offer all research papers and notes online for free, one detects a strong anti-commercial ethic at work here, which also helps to sell the idea to an ideological “leftist” faculty. I’m reading about this after having laughed at the ethos of the Free Artist License, i.e. copyleft, the rationale of which is tinged with an anti-commerce, even anti-capitalist, attitude.
How is Efficiency Obtained?
Economic policy is nowadays always measured against the standard of economic efficiency, that is, static efficiency. A concrete economic policy is deemed to be good if it improves the static efficiency of the market. The ideal economic policy should be the one able to drive the market to the nirvana of perfect competition, in which static efficiency is maximized, as is social welfare.
The problem is not so much that the static economic model does not reflect the reality. The real problem is that this model is used by regulators to make decisions. The well-intended regulator may decide to act as an antitrust regulator and punish any deviations from this efficient ideal, or he may decide to act as a sector regulator (e.g., setting prices) by imposing the efficient ideal directly. The result is to inhibit entrepreneurship.
